202 Victoria Street Kings Cross

Film

From the Kinetoscope Parlour set up in Sydney in 1894 and visited by 22,000 people in five weeks, to the latest Hollywood blockbuster filmed in Sydney's streets, film has been part of Sydney's story. Filmmakers have presented many different images of the city and its diverse inhabitants.

Jews

There has been a Jewish community in Sydney since the beginning of European settlement. With the Jewish free settlers who arrived from the 1820s, they built businesses and congregations in Sydney. In the late-nineteenth century, a new group of Jewish immigrants arrived from Eastern Europe, fleeing pogroms and persecution. Jewish Sydneysiders were active in public life and in business, settling in the eastern and inner western suburbs. The community doubled in size after World War II as immigration increased, and the community developed new educational and cultural organisations as well as a broader range of religious congregations.

Literature

Writing in and about Sydney started with letters, journals and official reports, but has grown to encompass every genre of literature.

Wayside Chapel

founded by Tedd Noffs, the Wayside Chapel has been a landmark in Kings Cross since 1963, helping locals and visitors and creating several organisations active in drug rehabilitation, life education and other social reform.

Sydney

Founded by Europeans as a social experiment, Sydney's beginnings brought death and dispossession to the original inhabitants of the place, as well as surprising freedom and prosperity to many of the convicts. Over its history, the city's growth has been shaped by factors that are common to many cities, but also by unique forces. In the twenty-first century, for the first time, the idea of sustainable progress is itself in doubt.

Green Bans movement

When builders labourers, organised by their union, refused to work on projects they found socially or environmentally undesirable, in Sydney in the 1970s, they started a new form of environmental activism. The Green Bans were to change the way Sydney developed

Kings Cross

Kings Cross exists in Sydney's imagination as much as it does in any physical form, and pinning down its geographical boundaries is difficult. It has loomed large in Sydney's culture since the first houses were built nearby in the 1830s, and continues to attract tourists and Sydneysiders alike.

A City of One's Own: Women's Sydney

A boom in apartment living brought freedom from the suburbs for many women in Sydney in the early twentieth century. In their writing, they celebrated Sydney as a place of unique freedoms, sensual pleasures and dangers for women;and the harbour as a steady, vivid source of joy